This programme is aimed at all levels of digital ability and confidence – both those who have never used the tools we’ll cover (don’t worry, we’ll help you get started!) and those who have used them before, but would like the opportunity to reflect on them and share their experience with others.

We’ll post very soon with details of how to register for the programme, but in the meantime, you might like to find out more about how LD5D works, what we’ll be covering in Module One, or see if any other questions are answered in our FAQ’s.

Well, that’s the end of the Ten Days of Twitter! I hope you enjoyed it, and that you are now tweeting confidently and productively if you were a beginner, or that you reviewed your practice and picked up a few hints and tips if you’d tweeted before. It was great to see so many people with experience of Twitter offering help and advice too- a fantastic demonstration of how Twitter can be a powerful learning network for professional development!

If you’re still catching up, don’t worry! The materials will remain online here for you to work through in your own time, and hopefully those who have already completed the course will be around on Twitter to offer support, advice and company!

So where will you go from here? Have you decided that Twitter isn’t for you (and at least now you can make that decision on an informed basis!), or will you keep tweeting and taking part in the discussions that form the #LoveLD Learning Development community? For myself, I really think it’s a great tool for my own CPD and for sharing practice and learning from others, and it’s been great to make so many new contacts.

If you need more help with using Twitter, the site’s own support pages are a good introduction to the various things it can do. Or if you google your question or search on Youtube for video tutorials, you’ll also find that there are a host of resources that people have made and uploaded to help others. But perhaps best of all, your Twitter network itself is a great place to ask questions and find people who can answer them, as we’ve found on this course!

Ten Days of Twitter is a precursor to the first module of LD5D, starting in August, on monitoring and managing your online profile and digital footprint. From there, we could cover a whole range of digital tools and topics, and we hope you’ll join us!

If you’d like to run a version of 10 Days of Twitter for your colleagues or students, please do! The materials are available under a Creative Commons license to be freely used and adapted. Click here for more information.

Ten Days of Twitter was a new format which we’ve developed and piloted. We’d really appreciate your views on the programme, so that we can improve future versions. Whether you’ve been participating actively in the programme or have been ‘lurking’ and just reading the posts, we’d really like to hear from you.The feedback questionnaire is now closed, but if you would ilke to leave a comment below, we’d love to hear from you!

Twitter is ephemeral. Tweets are short, throwaway observations, which capture the present moment, flow past quickly and are succeeded by more recent and relevant ones. We’ve looked at a way to favourite tweets, and to bookmark the urls they may contain, but once you’ve done this, why would you want to keep a tweet? Why would you want to tweet in advance?

The Past

You can scroll through your last few thousand tweets or so (which might cover quite a span of time, depending on how prolific you are) but searching and looking at hashtags won’t take you back very far, only a few days. And yet… although finding past tweets might be difficult, they can come back to haunt you. If you want to find a tweet, it might be quite tricky, and yet if you want a tweet to disappear, someone may be able to dig it up!

Deleting Tweets

Let’s look first at deleting. You can delete your own tweets, by hovering over it and using the option that appears below next to ‘reply’, ‘retweet’, etc. If you make a mistake in a tweet, it might be less confusing to send another tweet with a correction rather than delete one that people may already have seen. If you tweet something you shouldn’t… well, don’t! However, you can’t delete someone else’s tweets, so if they’ve already retweeted you, taken a screenshot or archived the tweet using some of the options below, it might be too late!

But what if you want to keep tweets, either your own or someone else’s? Why might you want to do this?

Perhaps a discussion on Twitter helped you to think something through, and you want to keep the discussion so you can work it up into a blog post, or integrate it into a chapter or article later

Maybe there was a good twitter ‘backchannel’ of livetweeting at a conference or other event, which you want to preserve either for yourself or others

Perhaps you want to preserve a selection of good advice or observations on a topic, when you asked for suggestions on Twitter and got some great responses. You might want to keep and share them with others.

Tweet URLs

You can save a link to individual tweets. Each tweet has its own URL. To find this, you click on ‘expand’ below the tweet, and you’ll see the date and time stamp. Next to this, it says ‘details’. If you click on ‘details’, it will take you to the URL of that individual tweet, which you can copy and paste. You could save it, bookmark it, embed it in a website, or email it to people.

This form might not be the best or most convenient way to present tweets for others though.

Your Twitter Archive

If you want a copy of all your tweets, then Twitter can send you an archive of everything you’ve tweeted. Click on the gear icon, and select ‘Settings’. In your ‘Account’ page, scroll down to the bottom where you will see an option “Your Twitter archive: Request your archive”.

However, one of the nicest ways to keep tweets, especially for others, is a third party application called Storify. Storify is the tool I used to make a narrative overview of the first week of Twitter, on Day 5. Storify is a way to create a narrative out of linking to content on the web, including tweets, websites and blogs, Facebook posts, Youtube videos or photos on Flickr. You can search for content, drag and drop it into a linear narrative, add some comments to contextualise it, and publish it on the web or share the URL. You are linking to the original source, rather than taking the content, so it doesn’t breach copyright. It automatically notifies people whose content you have used in this way, so if they object to your use, you can edit out their material (all the material visible to Storify is publically visible anyway).

Storify is a really nice way to create and share a summary of tweets and other online material around an event or discussion, such as a conference, blog or livechat.

If there have been any tweets over the course of the programme which you think will be useful to you, perhaps ones you favourited yesterday, or ones with further resources or advice on using Twitter, try archiving them in one of the ways shown above.

The Future

And what about future tweets?

You can schedule tweets to send themselves automatically later on. Although Twitter is a medium which captures the moment, there are several reasons why you might want to do this.

If your following contains people in a different time zone who are most likely to be online in the middle of the night, and you want to catch their attention

If you want to tweet repeated information, updates or reminders, perhaps about an event you’re organising, a blog or article you’ve written or a deadline for a job or funding opportunity, without having to remember to do it

If you’re away but want to keep some presence on Twitter

You can schedule tweets from both Tweetdeck and Hootsuite. To schedule a tweet in Tweetdeck, write a tweet as normal, and then click on the clock icon at the bottom of the window you’re composing a tweet in. This brings up a small calendar, where you can choose the time and date when you want your tweet to be sent.

You could also use an app called Buffer. You can sign in with Twitter (or Facebook, or LinkedIn), add an email address, and install it to your browser. Once signed in, it will ask you what you want to share. Type in a tweet, and click ‘buffer’. You will want to go to the ‘Schedule’ tab and set the timezone, and the day and time you want to tweet!

There’s quite a bit there to play with! Well, that’s the last of our Ten Days of Twitter, but don’t worry if you’re still catching up – so are others, and the conversation will be continuing on #LD10DoT, #LoveLD and #Studychat for quite some time! I hope you’ve found the programme useful, and thanks for joining in!

If you’re choosing who to follow effectively, then your Twitter feed should be full of interesting tweets and links to webpages etc which you might want to follow up on. It’s easy to lose track of it all, miss things and mislay things!

Twitter itself has a few features which can help you stay on top of all the information.

Favourites

If you see a tweet which interests you and which you’d like to come back to later, you can mark it as a ‘favourite’ and it will be stored for you to return to. To mark a tweet as a ‘favourite’, hover over the tweet, and a star icon will appear below it, along with ‘retweet’ and some other functions:

When you want to look at your favourited tweets, you will see them marked in your Twitter stream, but it’s easier to see them all together. If you click on the top tab with the profile icon and ‘Me’, a menu will appear on the left, with ‘favourites’ as well as your tweets, followers and following. Click on ‘Favourites’ to view.When you favourite a tweet, the person who tweeted it is notified, which may help to gain you an extra follower, but it also gives them feedback on what others are finding useful.

Search

You can also search for tweets, by username, hashtag or just by a keyword. The search box is at the top of the screen in the right hand corner. You can also organise the search results by top (most popular) topics, all results, or limit the results just to the people you follow. Once you have searched, a small ‘settings’ cog icon will appear next to the ‘search’ box (not the main cog icon at the top right of the screen!). If this is a search you might repeat regularly, click on this, and you can save the search so you don’t need to keep performing it. You could also perform an advanced search using this icon- you can narrow down the tweets you’re looking for by word or by the person sending or receiving it, or by location.

Trending

in the left hand column, Twitter will also show you what hashtags are popular at the moment. This may or may not be of much use to you! You can narrow the trends down by location, by clicking on ‘Change’ in this box, but if you are networking at a national or international level, this may not be very helpful.

Third party applications

If you’re feeling more adventurous again today, here are a few more third party apps which will help you curate all the links which people are tweeting about.

Tweetdeck

If you explored Tweetdeck yesterday, you may not have realised that not only can you add columns for lists of people, you can also add columns to follow hashtags. Click on ‘Add column’, and then choose ‘Search’. If you perform a search for a hashtag, you can add a new column to your Tweetdeck which will now display all the tweets using that hashtag, whether you follow the people using it or not. This might be useful if you are following a conference hashtag or chat such as #LoveLD but don’t want to follow all of the people tweeting with this hashtag.

Pocket is an application which saves any webpage for you to look at in more detail later, when you have time. It is a bookmarking tool -if you find a webpage via a link in Twitter (or anywhere else), you can save it to Pocket, and then return to it and the other things you’ve saved later on. Pocket is a web browser based service, meaning you can access it from anywhere and any device or computer. To create an account, you’ll simply need an email address, username and password. On your desktop computer, you can download and install it into your browser, so you can simply hit a button in your toolbar to save a webpage (how to install it depends on which browser you prefer to use, but Pocket will take you through the steps – it’s easy!). When you use Twitter in a browser with Pocket installed (and also if you have installed the Pocket app on your smartphone or ipad), then a ‘Pocket’ option appears alongside the other options of ‘reply’, ‘retweet’, ‘favourite’ etc when you hover over a tweet containing a link, so you can save it right from the tweet instead of having to open the link and add it to Pocket from there. You can also access Pocket on the web, if you’re on a computer which isn’t yours, or where you can’t install it into the browser.

If you don’t have a tablet device, you can set up an account with news.me, which will deliver the main stories shared by the people you follow on Twitter in an email. To sign up, you’ll need to add your email address, and then connect it with your Twitter (or Facebook) account by clicking on the request to authorise this. That’s it!

Paper.li is an application which curates content from social media streams which you use (in this case, Twitter, but also Facebook, Google+ etc). It then presents the links it’s found in a easy to read magazine form. You can share this with others (and it will tweet automatically on your behalf, but it is not recommended that you ‘spam’ your followers in this way!) but you can just use it to pick up the links you might have missed on Twitter by adding Twitter as a source.

Over the last 7 days, you may have found that as you continue to use Twitter, you come across more and more interesting people to follow and your following grows exponentially. Keeping track of them all can be a challenge, and sometimes you will want to focus on certain groups of them over others, or check in on some people only sporadically. This is hard to do in the undifferentiated stream of tweets on your Twitter feed, where they are all mixed in together. Fortunately, there are ways to split up your Twitter stream and group the people you follow into separate streams, so you can keep an eye on their tweets as it suits you.

You might want to group the people you follow into any of the types that we looked at in Day Three. Some examples might be

Colleagues or services at your institution

Colleagues and peers across the country/world in a particular field

Professional or funding bodies

News accounts

Social, personal or fun accounts

Twitter lists

Twitter has a feature which allows you to make lists of people – and you need not follow all of them to add them to a list. These lists can be private, so only you can see them, or they might be public so you can share them with others. I created such a list for the participants of this course on Day Two, so you could find each other on Day Three. You might create such a list for the benefit of others, for example, to bring together the attendees at a workshop or conference, or the top accounts on a particular topic which you recommend other people should follow. You can share a list by giving people the URL of the list page, or let them view the lists you’ve created on your profile, where they can subscribe to your lists too.

To create a list on Twitter, go to the gear icon at the top right of the page. Select ‘Lists’, and you will see a page which will contain any lists you will make. Click on ‘Create list’, and you will be asked to name your new list and add a brief description. This description will be very helpful if you now choose to make the list public, so others can find and subscribe to it.

You will now be invited to search for people to add to your list. You can also add them later, by clicking on their @handle and going to their profile. Next to the ‘Follow(ing)’ button, you will see the head and shoulders icon. If you click on this, you will see a menu containing the option ‘add or remove from lists’ (this is also where you can send them private Direct Messages, as in Day 4). While we’re on the topic of managing people, you can also block or report people using this menu, for example, if you are followed by a spam account or someone you don’t want following you.

To view your lists, you can simply go to ‘lists’ in the left hand column on your ‘Me ‘ tab, and see only the tweets from the people in that list.

You might want a more convenient way to view different aspects of your Twitter stream, or even add in updates from other platforms such as Facebook or LinkedIn together with Twitter, so your whole social media stream is visible in one place. To do this, you can use one of the third party applications that were developed to make Twitter easier to use.

Tweetdeckis owned by Twitter, and is a good way to manage more than one account, if you have more than one (for personal and professional use, or perhaps an individual one and an official one on behalf of an institution). I am using Tweetdeck to tweet from both @LD5Digital and @scholastic_rat at the moment without having to log out of one account and into another – and it’s easy to get confused and tweet from the wrong one! However, you can also use Tweetdeck to split your Twitter stream into columns divided by people. It will import any lists you have made on Twitter too.

You can do everything we’ve covered in Twitter on Tweetdeck too, including shortening URLs. Tweetdeck also makes some other things in Twitter a little bit easier. For example, when you retweet, it will ask you if you simply want to retweet or if you want to edit the tweet, as we discussed in Day 6. On Twitter, you need to copy and paste the tweet if you want to edit it, which can be fiddly; this does it automatically.

Hootsuite is similar application to Tweetdeck, but it allows you also to import other social media accounts such as Facebook. You can sign up using Facebook, or if you prefer to keep Facebook separate from your professional social media use, you can sign up with an email address, name and password. It will then ask you to add your chosen social network accounts. You can then add streams of content similarly as in Tweetdeck, and tabs for the different social networks. Hootsuite has a quick start guide to help you set up your account.

The other bonus of tools like Tweetdeck and Hootsuite is that you don’t see the advertising ‘promoted tweets’ from companies you don’t follow!

Think about the kinds of update you’ve seen on Twitter so far from the people you follow. Who do you most want to see tweets from? You might want to try making a list of your colleagues on Twitter, or perhaps one for the professional and funding bodies you follow.

Hashtags (using the # symbol) is where Twitter really gets interesting. The hashtag is, like the @message, a feature that was developed by users of Twitter, and was taken up and integrated by the platform as it was so useful.

Basically, the hashtag is a form of metadata. A # in front of a word signals that it is a keyword of some sort, tagging that tweet with a hash symbol (hence hash-tag). This means that you can easily search for all other tweets containing a word similarly marked with a hashtag symbol. In fact, you don’t even need to search – if you click on any hashtagged word, it will search for you.

The hashtag for 10 Days of Twitter is, as you’ve guessed, #LD10DoT. You can therefore search for any tweets containing that hashtag, whether you follow the people using it or not. It’s how I found out who was participating in the 10 days of Twitter, right on the very first day when you sent a tweet with the hashtag in.

(if you’re a Mac user and wondering where your hashtag key is, there isn’t one! You’ll need to press the alt key and the 3 key together to make the # symbol!)

A hashtag needs to be a single word, preceded by a #symbol, with no space in between. It doesn’t need to be a real word – it can be an acronym of some sort, like #LD10DoT , and it needs to be understood, known or guessed by the people it’s relevant to. It could even be several words run into one (which counts as one word!) such as #ILoveTwitter (it helps to capitalise the individual words to make it easier to read). What it should be above anything else, though, is short, so that it doesn’t use up too many characters!

How do you know what hashtags to use, or to search for? You make them up! If you’re creating a new hashtag, it’s good to do a search first and check if it’s been used before, and if so, whether you are going to use it in a similar way for similar people. If so, you’re joining a larger, pre-existing conversation! If not, then you might be confusing things, with a hashtag meaning different things to different people. If you’re talking to a limited, known group, as I am here, or as you might at a conference, then the hashtag might be meaningless to outsiders (which is probably fine – people for whom it’s relevant will probably be aware of it already or easily figure it out). If you’re creating a hashtag hoping to start a larger discussion which is open to all, then it needs to be self-explanatory and something that someone might very likely search for or guess.

You’ll see people using hashtags you might be interested in, and if you click on the hashtag, you will find all the other tweets using that hashtag recently. Or you can search for hashtags, using the search box at the top. If you click on the ‘#Discover’ tab at the top of the screen, you’ll see the top hashtags that the people you follow are currently using. When you hear the phrase ‘trending on Twitter’, it means that there are a lot of people talking about the same thing, using a common hashtag.

Someone might start a discussion about a topic on Twitter which is open to all to contribute, and it is drawn together using a common hashtag. #Twittergate (see Livetweeting below) is an example. You can also use it to gather responses. #OverlyHonestMethods is an amusing way for researchers to share the real thinking behind their methods, and give the public an insight into how research is done. #TweetMyThesis is one which is happening at the moment, sparked by this THE article, which you might like to contribute to – it’s a challenge!

Livechat

A live chat is a conversation on Twitter which takes place in real time. A topic, time and a hashtag is agreed by the leaders, and they are joined on the day by people who want to talk about that topic with each other. Livechats can be fast and furious, but a great way to discuss, make new contacts and share experiences. Popular ones which you might be interested in are #PhDchat and #ECRchat, which deal with the experience of being a PhD student or postdoc, and might offer students some moral peer support! The Guardian Higher Education Network also hosts livechats on a Friday, on #HElivechat. Search for the hashtags to see what was discussed last time, and join in the next one!

Livetweeting

To livetweet an event means to tweet about it while you’re actually participating in it. Conferences are often livetweeted. This may be done in an official capacity, with organisers inviting participants to livetweet the papers, giving attendees a pre-agreed ‘official’ hashtag to use, running up to the event, during and after, to find out who’s going to be there, what the papers were about, and any follow-up questions. A live stream of the tweets at the conference may even be displayed alongside the speaker on a ‘tweetwall’, using a tool such as Hootfeed.

If you’re at a conference, livetweeting it is a great way to connect to other attendees. It’s less nervewracking to approach someone when you’ve been ‘talking’ to each other already on Twitter, and if you’re at the conference on your own, you can find people to hang out with.

By livetweeting the presentations, you alert people who aren’t present that you are there, so they can find out more from you later if they couldn’t attend the conference, or were in a parallel session.

You can let your followers know who was presenting, and a brief insight into what the papers were about – if it sounds interesting, then your followers can look up publications by those people.

You can ask questions or for clarification from the presenter, from other conference attendees, or in fact anyone on Twitter, during the sessions. You can also enhance what the presenter is saying, with links to more information and comments.

It’s a way to continue conversations, perhaps with the presenter themselves, after the conference has finished.

People following the livetweeting from elsewhere can still participate in the conference, addressing questions for the speakers via tweets. This is especially effective if the conference is also being livestreamed on the web, with live video and sound.

Presenters themselves might find the tweets useful feedback, to see how people have responded to their paper.

However, livetweeting events must be approached sensitively and professionally. Some presenters may feel that the conference space is a closed group, and feel uncomfortable with their paper being conveyed outside the room to those who aren’t there. They may worry that their ideas and words are being misrepresented in 140 characters. It can also be quite distracting to see people typing away and surfing the internet when you’re presenting! There was a great deal of lively discussion about livetweeting a few months ago on Twitter, under the hashtag #Twittergate, and with blog posts from TressieMC, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Roopika Risam, Steve Kolowich and an article in the Guardian, which offers useful tips.

If you’re livetweeting, then do:

check with the organisers and presenters that it’s ok to livetweet

alert your followers that you will be livetweeting so they’re not confused!

make sure you tweet professionally – be polite and respectful! It will be very visible if you are being unpleasant about a colleague or peer.

ensure that you reflect the speaker’s words as accurately as you can, and make it very clear, as with livetweets, that you are conveying someone else’s words. You might, for example, tweet:

You’ve send a few tweets over the last five days – hopefully you’ve found plenty in your everyday routine as a Learning Developer which would be of interest to others, whether they are your peers, other professions within or beyond Higher Education such as policy, journalism or publishing, or to the general public.

But it really would be hard work to generate all the material yourself to feed your followers with regular, interesting tweets! Fortunately, you don’t have to – you can retweet the tweets of others. It’s sort of like forwarding an email, but to everyone who’s following you. They see the content of the original tweet, who it came from originally, and perhaps also a contextualising comment from you. By doing this, you’re performing a valuable service:

to your followers, by sifting the stream of information available to them, filtering out what’s potentially interesting to them, and also by making them aware of potential new contacts they can add to their network. They may already follow the person you’ve retweeted, in which case you’re bringing their attention to something they may have missed the first time. They may not yet follow the original tweeter, in which case, you’ve made available to them information they may not have had access to, and given them a new contact to follow.

to the people you follow, by amplifying their message and spreading it outside their network (and also possibly putting them in touch with new contacts)

and of course, you‘re displaying to others that you’re well connected to interesting and important people, and that you are a discerning judge of what information is interesting and significant!

To retweet a message, you simply click on the ‘retweet’ button which appears below each tweet when you hover over it.

The message will then appear in your followers’ twitter streams as if it appeared from the original sender, even though they may not follow them (although they might!). The tweet that they see will be marked with ‘retweeted by @yourname’ in small lettering, so if they look, they can tell that it was you who retweeted it.

However, as with sending @messages using ‘reply’, if you simply use Twitter’s ‘retweet’ button, you’re missing out on retweeting in the most effective way. The etiquette around retweeting is very much in sympathy with academic conventions of acknowledgement. You can quote the tweet – you can either copy and paste it into your tweet, or if you are using an app like iPad’s Twitter app Hootsuite or Tweetdeck (we’ll look at these later), they give you the option to quote or just retweet. This makes the tweet come from your account, rather than the original sender, making it clear that it’s you who has chosen to pass this information on.

However, that would make it look as if you’re claiming that it’s your tweet. To clarify that you’re retweeting, the convention is to

start the tweet by adding a comment of your own, if you wish and if there is room! If you don’t add any comment, then your retweet may be ambiguous – are you endorsing the original tweet? Plus, it may add context, value and character for your followers if you add something of your own.

write RT (which stands for retweet) and then the original tweeter’s @name

copy and paste their original tweet.

the result will look something like this:

So, to the original tweet, you’ll need to add RT and @name, and possibly quotation marks if you feel you need to clarify any further. Of course, as you only have 140 characters, adding these will eat into the original message!

You can, of course, cut out any part of the original tweet you feel is unnecessary, or to make space for your own comment, but to signal that you’ve done so, it’s polite to write MT (modified tweet) instead of RT. This is all a good reason to keep your own tweets as short as possible and not use up all 140 characters, so your own tweets can be easily retweeted!

If you want to retweet just a URL link that someone has passed on rather than their comment, you can add ‘via @name’ to clarify that you found the source through them.

Remember that to use Twitter effectively to promote your own work, you need to update frequently with interesting content to gain a following, and you also need to reciprocate and promote the work of others. No one wants to read or retweet a Twitter feed which is just broadcasting announcements about itself! This is true also if you are tweeting on behalf of a service – pass on useful information, if it’s not in competition with your own provision!

So have a look at your twitter stream and see if you can find tweets you think your followers might be interested in – funding opportunities, calls for papers, an item of news, a new blog post or publication someone’s tweeted about, a comment you agree with…and start retweeting!

We’re halfway through the Ten Days of Twitter – I’m really glad so many of you have joined us, and hope you’re finding it useful and fun! I’ve made several new acquaintances on Twitter, and will be following you for all your updates and information!

I’ve been curating the week’s tweets as we went along, and created this overview of the first five days of Twitter. We’ll find out how to do this later next week. For now, click on the link to view the conversations and discussions, and see quite how far we’ve come together!

If you’re following along but haven’t tweeted yet, or if you’ve only just found the programme, it’s not to late to join us! Send me a message as in Day 2 with my name @scholastic_rat and the hashtag #LD10DoT, and I’ll add you to the list of participants on Twitter that we can all view (see Day 3), to see who else is participating.

Have a great weekend, keep tweeting, and I’ll see you on Monday for Day 6!

You can’t say a lot in 140 characters – but you can link to other places on the web where a topic can be discussed at greater length, perhaps in an article or blog post. Maybe you’ve seen an item of news or a webpage you want to comment on or pass on to your followers. Perhaps you’ve just posted something on a blog or website and you want to encourage people to have a look. Twitter works really well as a way to bring people’s attention to other, longer things online.

You can simply copy and paste a website’s URL into a tweet. However, many URLs are pretty long, and even if they fit into 140 characters, it leaves less space for you to add a contextualising explanation or comment which will encourage people to click on the link. Fortunately, Twitter has an inbuilt URL shortener, which will cut the link down to 20 characters.

You can also use other URL-shortening sites, which will cut the link down to even less. Try these ones:

When tweeting a link, it’s good practice to begin your tweet with a brief comment explaining what it is and why you’re tweeting it. A URL by itself doesn’t necessarily say much about content or provenance, and a shortened one using one of the above services gives nothing away at all about what it is. Your followers will ignore your tweet and the link if they can’t immediately see what it’s about, where it’s from and why they should be interested.

A tweet with only a shortened link in it is very likely to be spam and senders of such tweets are likely to be blocked (here’s how to block users if you get such spam tweets). Moreover, it might be assumed that by sharing a link, you are endorsing the content, so if not, it would be as well to add a comment stating your stance on it – do you agree, or disagree? Or is it simply that you found it useful and think your followers might too? Another reason to keep the URL as it is rather than use a URL shortener is longevity – if that service is withdrawn, the link will no longer work. It’s a trade-off between keeping it short and having some analytics, and longevity and a bit more context in the URL.

So what might you link to?

a news story about Higher Education with a comment on how it’s reported

a conference or funding call that’s been announced

a book or article you recommend (or don’t recommend…)

a blog post you found interesting (and whether you agree or not)

slides or other material from a presentation you attended (or gave!)

a video on youtube or vimeo, perhaps of a presentation or talk, or public engagement

something you’ve uploaded yourself. This blog is set to update automatically on Twitter whenever I post something new (which is why there is a hashtag in the blog post title!). Try and personalise the automatic update message yourself if you can.

your new publication! There’s evidence that tweeting about your research output really helps to increase views, and therefore possibly citations!

You’re not expected to spend time deliberately looking for links to tweet to your followers; this is more a byproduct from anything you happen to be doing online anyway. And with more and more sites including a ‘Share This’ button or buttons for the various social media platforms, it’s very easy and quick to do. This is part of what we mean by being an ‘Open Scholar’ in the digital age – it costs you very little to share your useful daily digital finds with others, so why not?

See what you come across today online, and remember to tweet it to your followers!

EXTRA TASK!

As it’s Friday, let’s try using the #ff or Follow Friday convention. Did you follow anyone on Wednesday whose tweets turned out to be really useful, who you think we should be following? Let us know! A typical Follow Friday tweet might look like this:

You’ve sent some tweets, followed people and hopefully gained some followers of your own. Some people prefer to listen more than they tweet, which is fine – the only thing to consider is, the more you say about your interests, the more people will know what kind of information might be useful to you, and direct relevant things your way. It’s a way of fine-tuning your twitter feed as well as providing useful information to others.

Sometimes you might want to address a tweet to someone – it will be visible to other followers, but you want to catch a particular person’s attention with it. This might be because you are replying to or responding to one of their tweets, asking them a question, because you think they might be particularly interested in the information passed on in your tweet and want to make sure it catches their eye, or because you mention them in the tweet and want them to know, for example, if you retweet one of their tweets or are talking about their work. It may also be that you don’t follow that person, or they don’t follow you, but you still want to catch their attention with one particular tweet: they will still see it if you include their @username. For example:

hey, @scholastic_rat, enjoyed your presentation! Do you know @libgoddess’s work on this subject?

Giving a workshop at your uni next week, @scholastic_rat – are you around for coffee? would be great to meet up!

To call someone’s attention to a tweet with an @mention, you use their username or ‘handle’ preceded by a @ sign. For example, to let me know you’ve mentioned me, you would include ‘@scholastic_rat’ in the tweet. This is another reason to keep your Twitter handle as short as you can – it uses up some of the 140 characters! This is a feature that originated with the users of Twitter, which was then designed into the platform. It’s what has turned Twitter from a broadcast medium of updates into a conversation, and that’s Twitter’s real strength. Note – as the @ sign is reserved for marking people’s handles, you can’t use it as an abbreviation for ‘at’, for example, ‘let’s meet @6pm @cafe’ – it will treat these as an @message, and it’s likely that someone, somewhere, will have chosen @6pm or @cafe as a handle!

A small but important point is where you place the @username. If you are responding to a tweet, using the ‘reply’ button, then Twitter will automatically begin your tweet response with the @username, and you can then type the rest of your message. However, if the very first thing in the tweet is someone’s @username, then only that person and those who follow both of you will be able to see it. If you want the tweet to have a wider audience, then you either need to put a full stop in front of the @ sign like this: .@scholastic_rat OR you could include the @username later on in your tweet as part of the sentence, for example: ‘reading @scholastic_rat’s blog post about Twitter – some useful tips!’

Why might you want a wider audience to see conversations between you and another user?

What’s in it for them:

It’s polite to acknowledge them if you’re retweeting something they’ve said, or to let them know if you’re commenting on their work

You are drawing attention to them and their work to people who don’t already follow them – they get publicity and new followers

What’s in it for you:

You gain a reputation as a polite, helpful, knowledgeable and well-connected professional

You may also gain new followers or make new connections

What’s in it for followers:

They get to know about someone’s work which they may have been unaware of, and a new person to follow

They are offered a chance to contribute to the discussion too, and thereby gain new contacts and audiences

If replying to someone who’s passed on useful information to you specifically, it’s helpful to copy in their reply to your tweet response, in case your followers are also interested in the information.

Of course, there may be times when you don’t want a wide audience to see the interaction, if it’s not going to be understandable out of context, or of interest to them but just cluttering up their feed, and in these cases, you can just start the message with ‘@’. Remember that Twitter is a very public medium, and whether you @message someone or not, your tweets will be visible to anyone who views your profile. If you really want to send a message to just one person, but don’t want it publicly visible, Twitter allows you to send them a DM or Direct Message.

To see @messages directed at you, click on the tab marked @ Connect in your profile. They will also appear in your Twitter stream, but you may miss them there! Depending on your settings, you can also receive an email when someone @messages you. To set your account to email you when someone mentions you, click on Settings (the little cog icon at the top) and then ‘Email Notifications’ in the left hand menu.

So- send some @messages to people you follow- ask them a question, draw their attention to something, comment on something they’ve tweeted! And remember to send me (@scholastic_rat) an @message with the hashtag #LD10DoT to tell me how it’s going!